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OPINION

Guest columnist: Examining the relationship between political partisanship and support for HB2

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that HB2 is perhaps the most controversial and nationally salient bill that has ever come out of the North Carolina General Assembly. An unlikely coalition of folks — including the governor of New York, a group of children’s book authors, PayPal and even the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen — have weighed in against the bill. Our state’s governor, the Heritage Foundation and the majority of the General Assembly have come out for it. Four times as many people have Googled “HB2” than “Pat McCrory” over the last few weeks, demonstrating that, in this case, the bill is more newsworthy than the man who signed it.

The assumption in most of this debate (both within the Tar Heel State, as well expressed in the pages of national newspapers) has been that this is a partisan bill — that Republicans overwhelmingly support HB2 and Democrats almost unanimously oppose it. And through one lens, that is consistent with the facts. The state Senate vote, for example, was split perfectly along partisan lines — with all of the Republicans supporting HB2 and all of the Democrats opposing it. Public opinion polling on the subject also suggests that Republicans are twice as likely to support HB2 than Democrats.

Through another lens, however, HB2, while no doubt controversial, is less partisan than an initial read might suggest. According to a recent poll conducted for Time Warner Cable News by Survey USA, four in every 10 Democrats surveyed either supports or isn’t sure about HB2. An even more recent poll also conducted by Survey USA (this time for WRAL) finds support to be comparable — about 36 percent of Democrats either support or are not sure about the law. While Republican support for the bill is almost twice as strong as Democratic support, the fact that more than a third of Democrats do not oppose the bill is not inconsequential. For example, Democrats are twice as likely to support HB2 as they are to support Gov. McCrory or the General Assembly. This means that, at least among Democrats, the bill is more popular than its most prominent supporters. In sum, Democratic public opinion opposes HB2, but Democrats are by no means united on this question.

Turning back to the Legislature, while the Senate vote can be fully explained by partisanship, the House vote is a bit messier. Eleven Democrats voted for HB2 — that’s just a shade under one out of every four Democrats in the lower house of the General Assembly. And from a slightly different angle, the Democratic support gets even stronger — the 11 Democrats who voted for HB2 represent almost 30 percent of the Democrats who showed up to vote

A quick analysis of the Democrats who voted for the controversial bill shows that they are, on average, a bit more conservative than their Democratic counterparts who voted no (the Democrats with “excused absences” fall in the middle). Interestingly, the Democrats with excused absences have slightly smaller margins of victory in the last election than their counterparts who cast a vote on the issue.

Now it’s certainly possible to read too much into these differences. Democrats who support HB2 are the exception and not the rule, and it is clear that the Republican Party is fairly united in support of the bill. But in the polarized politics of today, most bills come in one of two flavors: either unanimous votes on relatively uncontroversial issues, or votes that end up with all members of one party on one side of the vote and all of the members of the other party on the other side. The fact that there was some division among Democrats is noteworthy and important — and provides important information for both supporters and opponents of HB2.

HB2 is no doubt controversial, but it is not a controversy that can be completely explained by partisanship. And Democrats and Republicans who run in the 2016 election as “pro” or “against” HB2 should remember that the vote, while no doubt important to the lives of millions of North Carolinians, may not activate partisans in the ways they expect.

Christopher Cooper is professor and department head in the department of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University. This is the fourth in a series of monthly columns that will interpret the current election through the lens of empirical social science research.